Selective Insurance Group KBW Insurance Conference 2026

I would say let us jump right into the questions.

Okay. Cover everything along the way.

Yeah. Sure. I am happy to start, and Patrick could certainly jump in and fill in any of the blanks. I will stop short of giving away any great ideas to our competitors.

There is that. I think most of us are doing a lot of exploratory work and trying to focus on all the key areas that impact performance in our business.

Ultimately, I think there are opportunities to impact every aspect of our performance. So let me just say that out of the gate, from expense ratio to loss and loss adjustment expense. Our view continues to be that if you win in this business long term, and this has always been the case, and we think it will always be the case, you have to consistently execute the fundamentals better than your competitors. What are the fundamentals? Identifying exposures and controls on an account-by-account basis. Based on that analysis of exposure and controls, getting the right price for the right risk and the individual attributes around those exposures and controls.

Claims adjudication, getting to the right outcome in the right time with the right claimant experience along the way. Your ability to enhance those fundamentals and amplify the impact of your knowledge workers that are executing those fundamentals is where all the value creation is. So I will say that out of the gate. There are efficiency opportunities that I think are the first things that we and others are harvesting. Very easy to measure. There are tasks that were done by people that can be fully automated, are being fully automated, and create significant efficiency that can be attributed based on the investment that is being made.

When you get into improving outcomes, that's where it gets a little bit harder to attribute because you're talking about impacting your loss ratios and your loss adjustment expense, which are also influenced at any given point in time by a host of other variables. I think, and you heard pieces of this throughout the last panel discussion, and there was a reference to quality assurance as a way to validate, and I think that's a great example and a great test case. I think the real power comes when you could take quality assurance and what tends to be an after-the-fact, backward-looking evaluation of decisions that are getting made, and convert that into real-time guidance. So guiding your knowledge workers through decisions they're making, through the judgment they're exercising, so you can actually have an impact before an outcome is determined. That's where the real investment is.

The other thing I'll say, and I think this is just part of the evolution of the implementation of AI, is it all started with developing tools and putting them out, or in many cases, these tools were developed by third parties. Putting them out into your employee base and hoping that amongst the thousand flowers, something will bloom. I think we've all gotten benefit from that. I think the real opportunity now at this point is to embed this knowledge and guidance into the workflow so that it's no longer hoping or encouraging employees to take advantage of these tools on a creative basis, but actually at an enterprise level, figuring out where the value creation is and embedding that into workflows. I think that's what'll really start to impact risk selection, individual underwriting decision-making, individual claim decision-making.

The final thing I'll say, and I guess this is sort of an angle with regard to efficiency, but I think it impacts ability to create differentiation in our business, is some of the earliest adoption and successful adoption of agentic tools is in the software engineering space. Which essentially allows us to dramatically increase the output that we're getting in terms of capability building in our technology for every dollar of investment we're making. So what was a dollar of investment for a dollar of output or value of output is now 2X, 3X, potentially 10X down the road, and I think that creates a much greater equalization from midsize carriers to big carriers in terms of what you could actually accomplish with the same dollar of investment. So those are a few areas I'd highlight.

I think maybe one additional theme that I'll touch on that the prior panel touched on as well is just the concept of change management and organizational readiness. Clearly, institutions that have established processes and ways of doing things, when you bring technology to that, change management becomes incredibly important. We're very focused on that, but I would say we also have made investments in terms of AI fluency across the organization. So we have required training. So to answer the question that was indicated to be asked of us by the prior panel, I will proactively answer it, that we do have training for every employee as it relates to AI to create a foundational element there, but then curated learning journeys based on the various roles that people play and/or their expressed curiosity. It's interesting. We had a conversation, John and I just did yesterday with our senior leadership executive team that stewards some of these activities, and we have pieces of AI capabilities that are available to folks, but it's been like a soft launch, and a number of folks who have actively found their way to it and explored in it has been really encouraging in terms of the internal demand for it.

I think there's a lot of excitement around this. I think, as John said, we need to make sure that we focus on delivering the fundamentals, driving better outcomes, enabling folks to make decisions in a more expedited but high-quality way to bring their job enjoyment up and our overall efficiency up as well.